SharePoint Conference 2014 Videos and Presentation Slides

Missed the SharePoint Conference 2014, March 3-6 2014 in Las Vegas, or was it too far away to go to from your perspective? Don’t worry, as of today you can view the sessions online on Channel 9. At this time there are about 253 videos available so I’m sure you won’t be bored if SharePoint and/or Office is your area of interest!

The SharePoint Conference is -the- conference to be when you want to learn the internals on how to build Office and SharePoint applications or manage the Office System, including all the client and server components. At this conference the Office/SharePoint teams open the books and share the roadmap for the upcoming year and beyond. This time SharePoint Conference 2014 was held in Las Vegas and has been attended by an unbelievable number of somewhat around 10,000 attendees.

Go ahead and click the SharePoint Conference 2014 Videos link here.

Showtime: Soof

The “Showtime” section on my blog is a reminder, mostly for my own reference but maybe helpful for other film enthusiasts as well, to remember what movies I’ve seen lately, what it was about and how I rated it in general.

My guess is the movie won’t be released abroad (outside The Netherland) so this Showtime item probably is not much of use for my foreign friends but if you are a Dutch reader here is my view on Soof.

Soof, a Dutch movie about a what I like to think of as a ‘common’ Dutch family life. A very recognizable representation of a family situation where a wife, husband and a couple of kids live together in an overloaded way of living. The husband Kasper (Fedja van Huêt), businessman, has a very busy company life filled with meetings and constantly trying to be on top of things. His wife Soof (short for Sophie – Lies Visschedijk) has a hobby of creating dinner services for other people but at the same time has the kids to worry about. Kasper gets the blame of doing nothing in the household and one day Kasper gets enough of it and decides on his own to take a year off and go for the sabbatical.

Soof now, in order to pay the bills, is the one to make some money on her hobby project. Something she always wanted but never imagined that it would really happen. Obviously all sorts of things go wrong, new relations start happening and soon it escalates.

Very recognizable plot for many of us and that is the real fun part of the movie. They did a real great job with that and the comedy level is high without exaggerating too much. The movie has been marketed as a so called Chick-Flick (and apparently that worked, with me only a couple of men were sitting in a room filled with women only, chatting and giggling) nevertheless I had a fun time watching the movie and rated it an Eight out of Ten in its category.

March 9, 2014

How to Install Office 2013 SP1 on Office365

A little while ago Office 2013 released its Service Pack 1 and I explained where to download the Service Pack. On your Windows RT machine there was no option to download an installer to update Office 2013 like you do on a regular Windows machine so I added an additional post to explain how that is done.

Office365 or other subscription based Office installations are also a bit different than the other installations to update your installation. These installations are mostly offered using the so called C2R installations where C2R stands for “Click-to-Run” installations. C2R installations are completely different than MSI installations, you can read more about it here. So how do you update a subscription based Office installation?

When using Office 2013 as part of a subscription the service pack is not offered via Windows Update or standalone installer. In this post I will show you this other installation option: how to install your Service Pack 1 on a subscription based Office installation in the steps below.

Start an Office client application such as Word
On the top in the Ribbon, Click File
Click and go to the Account Tab
There you’ll find an Office Updates section:

Here above you see the Dutch localized version but the idea is the same. To the left of the Office Updates (Yellow highlighted section there is an Updates Options button (here in the Dutch version called “Bijwerkopties”. From there you can select to check and update your Office version. Right after clicking the update option you’ll get a notification dialog that will say a new version is available or in that is the case saying the latest version already has been installed:

Again, for kicks I show you the here -Dutch- message box, not much different than the English one however … it told me there are Office Updates available and asks me if I wanted to install the update now.
Click Yes to continue installing the Service Pack 1 from here.

There you have it, I explained to you in this blog post that there is a slight difference between the installation options between the subscription based and the installed base Office version. To recap, here are once more the four options on how to install the Office 2013 Service Pack 1:

Stand alone installer
Windows Update on non Windows RT devices
Installation on Windows RT devices
Installation on subscription based installations (this post)

Confusing? A little bit if you ask me, especially if you are like me and have several different options to facilitate, but I guess most people just have one or two of these options in place. It seems that over time more and more people will shift to the subscription based option either in the context of Office365 or the Office Home program where you get five installations on a ‘family’ subscription for under hundred dollar a year.

Showtime: Walking with Dinosaurs 3D

Supposedly a spin off from the BBC series this is an animation feature where the viewer is brought back to the time on earth when Dinosaurs were around. I went to see this movie with my ten year old son and besides entertaining it probably also provided some learning moments as the movie explained some details around the existence of the Dinosaurs, differences between the various species and their natural enemies. As said, the movie was entertaining, some humor added and 3D effects on top to make it more impressing. Personally I like the ‘fun’ animation features like the Ice Age series a bit better that the more realistic animation feature like this one but I got the impression that for kids it was entertaining enough to earn a minimal Seven out of Ten.

March 4, 2014

New Office REST APIs and Developer Tools for Visual Studio Update

Tonight (here in Europe that is) Somasegar announced on his blog that the Visual Studio Team and the Office Team released a “number of significant updates for developers building apps that interact with the Office ecosystem”.

All of the updates are more or less related to building Apps for Office/SharePoint and the Cloud. If you need full integration (interacting between Word and Excel, building compound documents, Ribbon interaction etc.) I think you still need to use the ‘other’ option, VSTO. The downside of –that- however is that it won’t be as mobile a you’d like to see. You win some or lose some, depending on the technology you decide to use.

Back to the updates… Announced today were the new Office 365 APIs for consuming Office data and updates of Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio (not to be confused with Visual Studio Tools for the Office System aka VSTO, that is a complete other thing) and “Napa”.

Go and read the blogs for details on all of this, no need for me to repeat all of it Glimlach

The Office 365 Platform blog
The Visual Studio blog

This year I’ll try to deep dive on this a bit more to get into the subject of replacing your current Add-ins with Apps for Office/SharePoint – Can you or can’t you? Where are we at the moment. Everyone wants to move their Add-ins into the Cloud, but is it even possible today? More on this later …

Showtime: Philomena

Philomena is a movie nominated for 4 Oscars and a whole slew of other rewards. You wouldn’t expect that by just watching the trailer of the movie.

The movie is about a woman who got pregnant at a very young age and therefor was put away in a Catholic convent where her son was born. Shortly after that her son was taken away from her for adoption.

Journalist Martin Sixsmith started to follow Philomena’s story and together with Philomena he started their search for her long lost son who appeared to have been adopted by an American family. On the search they travel to the United States where they tried to find his current location.

The story of a mother searching for her son changed from a series of facts into an emotional piece of art where spectators in the audience had a hard time to keep it dry. In a silent moment you could hear a soft crying from all directions. The producer managed to touch the hearts of many with this drama. Nine out of Ten, highly recommended !

March 3, 2014

How to install Office 2013 SP1 on Windows RT

In my previous post I published the fact that Office 2013 just had just released their Service Pack 1 and explained where to download the Service Pack. On your Windows RT machine however there is no option to download an installer to go ahead in updating Office 2013 like you do on a regular Windows machine. How would updating be provisioned on Windows RT?

Look no further, here are the steps to install Service Pack 1 on your Windows RT machine:

In this case you are looking for an update to be found in Windows Update. So go to the start screen and:

swipe in from the right and click on Settings
On the bottom right click on “Change PC Settings”
Find “Update and Recovery” and click the link
Select Windows Update
This will show you all available updates, look for the update that says “Service Pack 1 for Microsoft Office 2013 (KB2850036) RT
Put a checkmark next to the update
Click the Install Button

That’s it … you only need to reboot after installing the update and you are good to go to work with your fresh updated Office 2013 RT.

Showtime:Last Vegas

This movie does not lack the big names to bring it to a success story, but is that enough? The story is all about a ‘gang of four’ being friends since childhood. They are now well over sixty and Billy (Michael Douglas) decided to take a shot and marry a thirty year or so younger girl and calls his buddies to arrange a bachelor party in Las Vegas (where coincidentally this week is the big SharePoint Conference 2014).

Things never have been very smooth between Paddy (Robert de Niro) and Billy. I won’t go into details to avoid spoiling the plot in details so take this for a fact. The four friends Billy, Paddy, Archie (Morgan Freeman) and Sam (Kevin Kline) need to solve things around this issue.

It’s an old men movie, kinda slow and the ‘big names’ in the movie aren’t making it much better. Events are somewhat predictable and won’t give you the thrills you would expect from the title “Last Vegas – It’s going to be legendary”. It wasn’t that legendary if you ask me. Six out of Ten.

February 27, 2014

Office 2013 Service Pack 1

Microsoft just released the first Service Pack (SP1) for Office 2013. As an Office SME, I have been developing solutions and worked with the product since the early versions waaaaaaaaaaaaaay back years ago, I’m always interested in what is going on in that area.

Getting information from the Office developer/development team is not easy these days, in fact … it never was… It has been a bit better, at the time they used to have Office Developer Conferences, in early years you even only were allowed to attend on invitation. The Office team is not one of the teams that shares a lot of information before going public on things. The Developer Division is completely the opposite and shares information whenever they can. In my opinion a much better way to work with your customers, get early feedback and make sure you stay on track – keep the train on the rails your customers are on. I know the Office team is just huge and also know the SharePoint Conference is targeted as replacement for the Office Developer Conferences but there is a huge difference between client applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access and many more and SharePoint. SharePoint is mostly a Server environment.

Even if you are in the Office Beta process there are only one or two drops to look at and this does not make it easier for a full time Office Developer to get pain points addressed. Identifying bugs (often not in the product itself but in many cases caused by all sorts of ‘undocumented’ collisions or limited documentation) can be -very- time consuming and tedious at times. It would really help if that improved a bit…

Oh well, so much for the rant, back to the Service Pack…

Besides a cumulative rollup of previous fixes released earlier, up to approximately somewhere around January, it also include a whole slew of other fixes found in the product.

A list of fixes can be found here: (Excel Workbook)

For an overview of Service Pack 1 you can read the official announcement on the Office Updates Blog

Service Pack 1 is available through several channels like Windows Update or direct download:

Download the Microsoft Office 2013 SP1 32-bit package now

Download the Microsoft Office 2013 SP1 64-bit package now

Enjoy your updated Office Suite, it just got to be a little bit better than it already was … Let me know what you think about it in the comments!

Showtime: Free Birds 3D

Free Birds, an animated feature about Reggie the Turkey. He found that turkeys are there to be sacrificed and be the Thanksgivings dinner star. He tried to warn his fellow turkeys but ends up as the annual Pardoned Turkey living in wealth and luxury. Until he meets Jake, or rather Jake finds him, the two of them travel back in time to 1621. The story evolves and allegedly history of Thanksgiving is visualized.

A movie with lots of humor for kids but also entertaining enough for adults. I enjoyed watching the adventures of Reggie and Jake with my daughter on the big screen (no, there are no extra credits for that) so Seven out of Ten.

February 5, 2014

Satya Nadella is the new CEO of Microsoft

Today Microsoft announced that Satya Nadella will be the new CEO of Microsoft following Steve Ballmer who announced last year to retire in 2014. With that, Satya asked Bill Gates to step back in, but with a different hat on -no not that hat– but as “Technical Advisor focusing on products and technologies”.

Instead of me telling all of this to you, it is probably better to let the board speak for itself and show you the official announcements as available on YouTube.

Steve Ballmer welcomes Satya Nadella as Microsoft CEO

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy8Qhcf_moA]

Microsoft Chairman John Thompson on CEO Satya Nadella

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3K5lloQTT8]

Bill Gates welcomes Satya Nadella as Microsoft CEO

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5BhQVuRcTk]

All great, these kind words and praise for the man, but what did he have to say for himself? Well, here is his first (short) interview as CEO of Microsoft:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8JwNZBJ_wI]

In fact, I have met him (at a distance Glimlach ) earlier last year and the year before when he did his Keynote for the //Build conferences for the years of 2012 and 2013 in the role of President, Server and Tools Business.

Who would have expected that today he would be CEO of this huge worldwide company? Let’s see how he will do in the near future and how it will affect the current policies at Microsoft.

Showtime: La Grande Bellezza

La Grande Bellezza (“The Great Beauty”) is a piece of art, the sceneries, panoramas or just the way it was filmed as a whole is just great. The story is about Jep Gambardella turned sixty-five and is overlooking his life trying to decide if his life had the quality level he wanted out of it, would he be able to write a new book worth reading meeting the quality bar. He once wrote a book and was successful with that one but lived his life after that as a highly respected journalist.

The images of Rome, the nightlife of nightclubs and parties and all of the extravaganza around it all is a joy to look at. The category of the film may be Film Art (and Art it is!) but is not the kind of movies stamped to be dull and boring. In fact I gladly surprised and even though the movie is not for ‘everyone’ on my list it proved to be a Great Beauty and allow it to get Nine out of Ten at least for being something completely different.

February 1, 2014

InfoPath, the official message about its future

It has been in the dark for years, InfoPath didn’t get many updates when the latest Office version (Office 2013) arrived and on customer questions there was always the “we haven’t announced any plans or decided change of policy” kind of answer about the future of InfoPath.

InfoPath, if I am honest, never really got off and the adoption rate was low. It was however the foreseen application to build and deploy your forms (often to SharePoint, but could also be used locally). One of the main issues might have been that there wasn’t a free InfoPath forms client to get the adoption rate up.

To me the lack of information about the future of InfoPath always was an indicator that the product was close to end of life. This on the other hand really took a while to be confirmed.

That said, yesterday – out of the blue, there was this Official Office Blog Post to be found on the Office site:
Update on InfoPath and SharePoint Forms

In this blog Microsoft announced that, quote: “InfoPath 2013 is the last release of the desktop client, and InfoPath Forms Services in SharePoint Server 2013 is the last release of InfoPath Forms Services”

Existing customers will be supported through 2023 so no worries if you are using this technology. The blog post does not provide any other information on what will be offered as a follow up on InfoPath other than that it will be presented somewhere in Q4 of CY 2014 (this I think actually is Q2 2014 in real life as Microsoft has a broken book year).

My guess is that the announcement of InfoPath vNext will be at SharePoint 2014 Conference (with Bill Clinton as Keynote Speaker!). The SharePoint conference, with the Office Developer Conference disappeared for years now, will be the place to be if you want to know what happens to InfoPath or the other Office products. So… follow the news around the SharePoint 2014 Conference… attend the conference.

Showtime: Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit

Jack Ryan (Chris Pine, took me some time to realize that he also did a couple of the Star Trek features) is sure about it after 9/11, he wants to serve his country by joining the marines and meets Cathy Muller (Keira Knightley) when recovering in the hospital after a dreadful accident with the militaries. It was somewhat funny to hear Keira talk. Her usual British accent was suppressed and she tried to make it sound a bit more American accented. Not sure if that was intended or maybe she took lessons in talking without dialect Glimlach .

After his recovery he gets the offer and joins the CIA. By doing so he gets involved in James Bond alike scenarios and one of those is that he discovered a terrorist group planning to disrupt the US economy by messing up the trade markets on Wall Street. Jack goes to Russia to sort this out and from there blocking the terrorists from executing their plans.

The movie is a nice “sit, relax and watch” movie. Nothing spectacular to remember though but it was sure fun to watch. Seven out of Ten should do it.

January 29, 2014

Visual Studio Online Updates – January 22

Last week Team Foundation Services, by now renamed and added additional features called “Visual Studio Online”, had its first update for 2014.

Updated features:

Querying Tags
You can add tags to your workitems, but what is the use if you cannot query on these tags to find your workitems. That has been solved for this update. With the January 22 Update you are now able to create queries with for instance the “Contains” or “Does Not Contain” operator to find the work items you were looking for.
Removing Weekends from Burndown
Somewhere in the world are developers who are not working in weekends. I’m not one of them as I tend just to work in weekends, but that is maybe because I don’t see work as work. For all others it is now a new feature to be able to ‘uncheck’ resources in weekends on your team and allow your team to have a couple of days off in the weekend (or every other day if you like) to get a somewhat more realistic Burndown overview.
Configurable Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD) Dates
Previously the start date of your project was the day you created the project. Not always true so now you are allowed to change the start date of your project. So now you can create your project beforehand and set the start date to the actual date, again a more realistic view on your project.

“Is that all?” you may wonder? Yes that is all, but you must keep in mind that the updates are now on a monthly release cycle, or so called Sprints. Given that December has been an overall Holiday Season month I actually expected that they would skip the monthly cycle for this time but they didn’t so it is a real achievement they were even able to ship this last week.

Showtime: Frozen by Disney

Just another great movie from the Disney animation studios. A familiar storyline, fight between good and evil, royalty, princesses and a good amount of humor.

The animation again is excellent, the storyline is touching and an enjoyable movie to go for young and old.

The story is about Anna and Elsa, two sisters who lost their parents and will now rule the kingdom. Elsa however has icy powers and as a kid almost killed her sister Anna in their play. Given that Elsa decides to move away from the castle to prevent her from doing harm to the community and most of all to keep her sister safe. In a search for her sister Anna meets Kristoff and his reindeer Sven and they try to get Anna to move back into the castle to be the new queen of their kingdom.

I always have been a huge fan of Disney and this again is a great piece of work they created to entertain us. It really does not matter if you have kids or don’t, you can go and watch the movie with or without kids, don’t be shy and just enjoy the story, the images and funny characters. Ten out of Ten (but hé, be aware, I am biased as a Disney fan!)

January 24, 2014

Installing Visual Studio 2013 Update 1

Yesterday I received the notice on one of my machines for the update 1 from within Visual Studio 2013. So for your entertainment I recorded the steps and in this post I will show you how the process of installing Visual Studio 2013 Update 1 evolves.

What you see below is the notification in Visual Studio 2013. It shows you the information area containing the information that the Visual Studio 2013 Update 1 is available and that it includes security updates, critical updates, hotfixes and feature packs.

Once you start the process of installing the Update the Extensions and Updates dialog is displayed with the option to install the Update. Click the Update button to proceed.

As you started the update from within Visual Studio 2013, the Update process warns you and asks you to close Visual Studio. Close all instances of Visual Studio and click Continue to go on.

Next you’ll see the license terms and privacy policy dialog you’ll have to agree on and accept if you want to install Visual Studio. You won’t see the buttons to continue if you don’t check the checkbox to agree with the license terms. So check the checkbox.

The Install “button” will be added to the dialog. Click Install to continue and a security dialog will be launched to allow the installer to run in Admin Mode.

Now, sit back and relax … wait for the installer to do its work and install Update 1 for you. There is no more interaction needed until the Update is fully installed.

Done! If all went well you’ll now see the Setup Successful dialog and can launch Visual Studio 2013 Update 1. Click the Launch “Button”.

Step into the menu … Help – About Microsoft Visual Studio and check to see if it has the Update 1 in the version information.

That’s it, that was easy, not much to go wrong on, the Update 1 is now installed and you can enjoy the fixes and other things added to the update (see my earlier blog post with references to what is updated in this version.

Enjoy, and don’t forget to share your feedback!

Showtime: 47 Ronin 3D

47 Ronin is a highly computer generated graphical production (CGI) on the story of a group of samurai, the 47 Ronin that will take revenge of the loss of their leader who was forced into committing Seppuku (A tradition where someone is offered to take his own life instead of being ashamed and executed).

Not only does the movie contain a lot of special effects but also the legend was dramatized by additional witchcraft, spells and other special sauce to put more flavor to the whole of the movie.

Keanu Reeves plays the role of Kai, who as a boy was adopted and with the samurais sets out for revenge against the Shogun’s order responsible for the death of their leader.

The images in the movie are quite spectacular where the storyline in itself is not. The movie takes you into the world of Eastern rituals of the eighteenth century covered special effects from the twenty-first century. It all is entertaining to watch, especially on the big screen so definitely a candidate to go to and watch in the cinemas, you won’t enjoy the effects as much on DVD at home. The story isn’t all that great though so overall I think the number on this movie does not get higher than a Seven out of Ten.

January 23, 2014

SDN Event Speaker Request

For our quarterly Dutch SDN Events we are always looking for people with interesting presentation proposals. March 28th of 2014 is our next SDN Event and already have received several proposals. To name a few topics (preliminary, subject to change):

Team Foundation Server
Azure Mobile Services
Roslyn
Windows 8/8,1
Windows Phone
Delphi
HTML5
Microsoft Dynamics NAV

@MarcelMeijer

@aafvstam

SDN

Showtime: Paranormal Activity, The Marked Ones

Paranormal Activity, The Marked Ones is not part of the other Paranormal Activity series (Paranormal Activity 1,2,3,4 and 5 on its way to arrive this year) although it does include some hidden footage from Paranormal Activity 3 but is a so called spinoff.

The story is about high school graduate Jesse and he is experiencing weird things after his neighbor was found dead. He is curious to see what happened there and investigates the abandoned home of his neighbor. Not long after that he appears to be marked for possession and affecting the people around him.

The movie feels a bit low budget (the actual budget was $5,000,000 so what is low) and to me was not that thrilling. As with the other Paranormal Activity movies this one was also captured as if it was recorded using a home video camera (as seen in the The Blair Witch Project) and gives you a messy interpretation of what is happening. Overall not the best horror movie available and I wouldn’t recommend spending your money on going to the cinemas. Instead wait for the TV, DVD or VOD and watch it at home with a bag of chips and get on with your life. Four out of Ten I’d say …

Author: maartenvanstam

SharePoint Conference 2014 Videos and Presentation Slides

Showtime: Soof

Like this:

How to Install Office 2013 SP1 on Office365

Showtime: Walking with Dinosaurs 3D

Like this:

New Office REST APIs and Developer Tools for Visual Studio Update

Showtime: Philomena

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How to install Office 2013 SP1 on Windows RT

Showtime:Last Vegas

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Office 2013 Service Pack 1

Showtime: Free Birds 3D

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Satya Nadella is the new CEO of Microsoft

Steve Ballmer welcomes Satya Nadella as Microsoft CEO

Microsoft Chairman John Thompson on CEO Satya Nadella

Bill Gates welcomes Satya Nadella as Microsoft CEO

Showtime: La Grande Bellezza

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InfoPath, the official message about its future

Showtime: Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit

Like this:

Visual Studio Online Updates – January 22

Showtime: Frozen by Disney

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Installing Visual Studio 2013 Update 1

Showtime: 47 Ronin 3D

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SDN Event Speaker Request

Showtime: Paranormal Activity, The Marked Ones

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Showtime: Soof

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Showtime: Walking with Dinosaurs 3D

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Showtime: Philomena

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Showtime:Last Vegas

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Showtime: Free Birds 3D

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Steve Ballmer welcomes Satya Nadella as Microsoft CEO

Microsoft Chairman John Thompson on CEO Satya Nadella

Bill Gates welcomes Satya Nadella as Microsoft CEO

Showtime: La Grande Bellezza

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Showtime: Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit

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Showtime: Frozen by Disney

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Showtime: 47 Ronin 3D

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Showtime: Paranormal Activity, The Marked Ones

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